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3 content marketing skills you probably already have

Definitions of content marketing oftentimes make the strategy sound more daunting than it is. Put simply, content marketing is about a give-and-take relationship between you and your customers. By freely sharing information that your customers will find valuable and relevant, you are offering them real value rather than a sales pitch.

Clouded by all of this marketing jargon, you may not realise that you already have the necessary skills to be a great content marketer.

Here are the 3 content marketing skills you probably use on a daily basis without even knowing it:

1) Creative thinking

The first step of any content marketing strategy is ideation. To be succesful, you need to first and foremost be a creative and original thinker. As a small business owner or a potential business owner, you’ve already found yourself to be an ideator. Your inventive thinking led to the Big Idea that launched your business. Now, you’ve been entrusted with the important task of sharing your knowledge with your customers. Your knowledge and creative thinking skills demonstrate your ability to tackle business and marketing strategies in new ways. This, therefore, makes you an authority in your speciality. By taking your skills as an ideator into the content marketing realm, your ideas and suggestions can become useful pieces of content for your customers or your audience.

“The goal of great content is to add value to your customers; future profit opportunities will follow…”

2) Storytelling

Storytelling is essential to content marketing. If you know your audience, you know what kind of subject matter would make a good story to them. Creating content that is interesting and important to your audience is key. What characterises a great content marketer is the ability to weave that information into a narrative that is accessible. It is additionally important that this narrative engages your reader from start to finish. The goal is to add value to your customers. Future profit opportunities will follow as you become a trusted source for information in your industry and your customer base grows. By focusing on creating content that tells a story that interests your audience, you will not only maintain your audience’s loyalty but it will continue to grow.

3) Adaptability

As the media landscape continues to undergo changes, content marketers with a bit of digital savvy have an upper hand. It is useful to be able to use creative problem solving abilities to adapt to new industry changes, i.e. the demand for more interactivity. Interactivity in your content has become non-negotiable. If you’ve written what you think is an engaging piece, push it one step further by including hyperlinks (maybe an inbound link to a relevant piece of content your customers may have missed), an infographic, or a video. Including interactive elements makes the content accessible to a wider demographic with varied interests.

Another great way to adapt to the demand for more interactivity is through social media platforms. By posting your content on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, your customers (both current and potential), can interact with your posts by liking, commenting and sharing them. Additionally, it creates more opportunities for measuring success beyond just clicks and visits.

Now that you’ve realised you’ve had these skills on your content marketing tool belt all along, you can continue creating compelling and valuable content for your audiences and grow your small business.

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